Ever since I discovered the wealth of information available at the Tropical Weather page at Weather Underground, I've become a bit of a hurricane junkie. I have fun stopping by twice a day and seeing the state of the art in predicting quite chaotic phenomena. The "discussion" links are relatively informative and rather honest about what the don't know.
I sorta want to see one up close, just once, just to see what 70+ mph winds look like. We may have had a blizzard that bad when I was a kid, I'm not sure. There's some chance of seeing one in D.C. I survived two trips to Disneyworld in September without danger.
There was just a show on the History Channel on the Galveston 1900 hurricane, and the moderate amount of hubris from the US Weather service that made it more deadly then it might have been. The city was on an island only 8 ft. above sea level at its highest, yet their local weather service chief basically declared Galveston safe from storm surge due to the shallow bay behind it. In addition, by Sept. 1900 the US was refusing to allow Cuban storm spotters to wire reports to the mainland, instead trusting the word of less experienced US personell. The Cubans correctly guessed that the storm which passed over western Cuba would turn towards the Gulf, and not across Florida as the US men said. This cost Galveston the chance to watch the skies and be ready, and in fact the hurricane warning flags didn't even fly until after it was far too late to evacuate. The storm intensifed over the heated Gulf and the entire island was underwater at the height of the storm. Death toll: 7000-8000.
I think of all the disasters that plague various areas, I'd have to take the midwest. We get blizzards, but those can be forecast with some lead time, and if you stay inside you're ok. You get tornados, but they generally hit narrow disaster zones. Really disasterous, of course, but of low probability. The west coast has the earthquakes, rare but completely unpredictable and quite devastating. I have similar thoughts on volcanoes, plus add relentlessness of lava flow. And though I do want to see a hurricane, living in the Atlantic or Gulf coast means one is coming sooner or later, and they are overwhelming in power and sheer swamping ability.
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There's a book by Eric Larson called "Isaac's Storm" about the hurricane and hubris that hit Galveston in 1900, but you probably already know that.
That is, in fact, the book the program was derived from.
Based on the story and the hubris--particularly after when Isaac (the weather bureau guy) rewrote history to make himself look better and/or stay in denial about his wife'd death, claiming he was warning people the day of the storm when in fact he did nothing--there's a heck of a three hour bloated Hollywood epic in there.
Most of the people down here in Florida don't seem to care about hurricanes. If you live far enough inland, they really are not much worse than a bad storm up north. Very comparable to a bad blizzard. The people crazy enough to live on the shore usually are well insured, so they really seem to see it as a minor inconvenience in exchange for living in "paradise." I'm not defending them by any means. I think it is quite nutty myself, and I live inland. But it is interesting to me that while I was up in Michigan during Bonnie and Charley, everyone was saying to me "Wow, who in heck would ever want to live down there?" My response was "Funny. They say the same thing about all of you during the winter." In both cases, the people that are really in danger are the homeless and the poor people living in mobile homes. Sucks to be poor.
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